‘I envy the mind hiding in her words,” Mary McCarthy opined of Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979), a poet admired for her air of secrecy during the heyday of confessionalism, when poets regularly hauled their Freudian couches into the amphitheater. Bishop’s poems, in contrast, invoke textured scenes and piquant characters—a marketplace in Marrakesh, Robinson Crusoe glumly restored to England, a child in a dentist’s waiting room—charging them with psychological tension, intrigue, and widening gyres of feeling.
The pleasure principle in Bishop’s poetry is her associative imagination. Like the child narrator in “In the Waiting Room” encountering human nakedness in a National Geographic for the first time, Bishop invites her reader to inhabit the paradox of being “too shy to stop.” Shyness, like shame, binds both ways: We shy away from shameful things while often being drawn to study them. Ashamed of ourselves, or on account of others, we also become shy. Bishop’s poetry rides such hinges; and a shyness, of sorts, governed her career in letters.
Unlike her more prolific peers, Bishop remained a fastidious perfectionist, publishing four major collections in 30 years (1946-1976) and less than 90 poems in total. At that rate, she was writing less than three published poems a year, accreting, by painstaking degrees, an oeuvre of finished work and 3,500 “papers” by the time of her death. The latter have been hungrily excavated by critics who have brought portions of Bishop’s letters, poem drafts, essays, and prose fragments to a broadening audience in such collections as Alice Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe & the Jukebox (2006), Robert Giroux and Lloyd Schwartz’s Elizabeth Bishop Library of America edition (2008), and Joelle Biele’s Elizabeth Bishop and ‘The New Yorker’ (2011).
This archival archaeology has not been without controversy. Some purists, including the estimable Helen Vendler, have resisted this undoing of the poet’s Horatian hesitancy, a reticence that likely had as much to do with Bishop’s aesthetic standards as with perceived liability. Bishop had lesbian relationships, and she was an expatriate during much of the Cold War. When she served as the poetry consultant for the Library of Congress (now the poet laureateship) in 1949-50, federal employees could be dismissed for homosexuality. Twenty years later, Bishop joked that she desired—in her Boston seaside apartment and in her public life—“Closets, closets, and more closets!”
Yet secrets, in poems, can be solicitous. Here, in Colm Tóibín’s new book, the Irish novelist explores Bishop’s remoteness in ways that both open her poems to the everyday reader and season scholars’ broth about her eminence. John Ashbery once called Bishop a “writer’s writer’s writer,” and Tóibín reveals how this hypothesis has been, in his case, positively true. Though this book is not a biography, it has the uncanny effect of one: In close readings of Bishop’s poems and their geographical moorings, Tóibín takes us further inside the poet’s (and his own) psyche than, perhaps, the archives ever will.
When Tóibín first purchased a copy of Bishop’s Selected Poems in 1975, he was a 19-year-old university student on holiday in London. Forty years later, he is the author of eight novels, including three shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, and the Irene and Sidney B. Silverman professor of humanities at Columbia. What Tóibín finds in Bishop—and in fellow travelers Gerard Manley Hopkins, James Joyce, and Thom Gunn—is an aesthetic rooted in hydraulic power, a language operating within the specific confinements of place.
Thus, Tóibín reads Bishop’s classics against their geographical (and existential) backdrops, situating her famous poem “Roosters” in a Key West transformed into a World War II naval base; “The Moose” in a night bus to Boston; and “Crusoe in England” in connection with Bishop’s return to America after more than a decade in Brazil. The technical rigor in Tóibín’s analyses secures our trust in his more abstract mapping of the poet’s spiritual cartography.
Tóibín notes, for example, that Bishop, like Joyce, “was more at ease, or less ill-at-ease, in exile.” Yet for all her travels, Bishop “made her homes on a single line of longitude,” darting like the anxious bird in her poem “Sandpiper,” who runs . . . finical, awkward, / in a state of controlled panic, a student of Blake. For both Bishop and Joyce—and for Tóibín himself—years lived as a foreigner, far from home, enabled the composition of a homely “music filled with risk and repetition, which would mimic the tones of prayer, the mind at its most exalted.” “Prayer,” as the etymological cousin of “precarious,” suggests the risk and reward of such displacement.
Place was important to Elizabeth Bishop because, in many ways, “home” kept eluding her. Effectively orphaned at the age of 5, following her father’s death and her mother’s psychiatric incarceration, Bishop spent much of her childhood shuttled among relatives. With a knowing tenderness, Tóibín revisits Bishop’s autobiographical stories, “In the Village” (1953) and “The Country Mouse” (1961), in which the poet recounts her mother’s deranged scream hanging like “a slight stain” in the Canadian sky and the miserable months she spent with her paternal grandparents in Worcester, Massachusetts, where she was assigned suitable playmates, immovable dolls, and “four hideous dresses” of Victorian design. Bonding with Beppo, the neurotic self-punishing dog, Bishop developed severe asthma while in her grandparents’ care. That autoimmune disorder, and the poet’s concomitant search for breathable air, motivated many of her adult peregrinations.
Colm Tóibín, like his subject, has mastered the difference between confidence and confession, secret and screed. In his most revealing chapter, “The Art of Losing,” he describes his own childhood on the Wexford Coast of Ireland and the blunt trauma, at age 8, of witnessing his father’s return from brain surgery in Dublin, “an enormous gash on the side of his head . . . the flesh stretched to where the stitching had been done.” As his father struggled to walk and speak, succumbing to death three years later, Tóibín himself developed a stammer, an inability to start sentences with hard consonants and, at times, pronounce his own name.
The vast unspoken is the little pole / that pierces both . . . body and . . . soul in the mechanical toy of Bishop’s “Cirque d’Hiver,” and it serves, by extension, as the axis of these writers’ sensibilities. The echo of a mother’s psychotic scream hides in Bishop’s didactically precise descriptions: the correctness of a child who has lost her “mother’s watch.” Similarly, throughout Tóibín’s fiction, nonfiction, and this book of homage, there is a legible desire to keep “memory barracked in” and language angled at “a form of calm, modest knowledge or maybe even evasion.” Growing up in a rural district where, in the face of hardship, “a word was a tentative form of control . . . [g]rammar . . . an enactment of how things stood,” Tóibín notes the native resistance to “easy feeling” he shares with Bishop, a stance that she, an ambivalent American, coyly termed her “George Washington complex.”
On Elizabeth Bishop delicately observes the little that we get for free, / the little of our earthly trust. Not much. Yet it earns our fealty by finding it, in Tóibín’s judicious extrapolation, “enough to be going on with. Or perhaps not.”
Heather Treseler is a poet and essayist in Boston.
